Ebony G. Patterson Named 2024 MacArthur Fellow

Ebony G. Patterson Named 2024 MacArthur Fellow

EBONY G. PATTERSON NAMED 2024 MACARTHUR FELLOW
Highlighting the ART FOR CHANGE artist’s newly awarded MacArthur Genius Grant

 
Ebony G. Patterson pictured in her studio.

Ebony G. Patterson is a multimedia artist creating intricate, densely layered, and visually dazzling works that center the culture and aesthetics of postcolonial spaces. Patterson’s practice includes painting, photography, video, performance, sculpture, textiles, and installation. Across media, her works address themes of postcolonial space, visibility and invisibility, regeneration and mourning.

In the artist’s 2018 survey, “...while the dew is still on the roses,” Patterson included work produced over the five years leading up to the exhibition, including an installation that referenced a night garden. In her signature style, Patterson incorporated tapestries, videos, and sculptures which included glitter, lace, and beads. In Patterson’s 2022 ART FOR CHANGE print, She Is the Mourning, the artist similarly focused on the role that gardens played in her practice, incorporating similar themes of spaces of both beauty and burial, aesthetics and mourning.

Read the full highlight from the MacArthur Foundation here.

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EBONY G. PATTERSON
She Is The Mourning, 2023
36 x 33.75 inches

Limited edition of 20 with 6 AP + 1PP
Hand-embellished, signed and numbered by the artist

SHOP THE PRINT

She is the Mourning is derived from a recent public art project that the artist unveiled in 2021, comprising four large-scale works that adorned the facades and walls of buildings throughout Philadelphia’s Village of Arts and Humanity. The series shines a light on the under-acknowledged labor of Black women in working-class communities, especially in acts of care, protest, and mourning. Each of the scenes includes headless, monumental figures embedded in dreamlike and embellished gardens, punctuated with a poetic phrase. For this limited edition, Patterson will transform the prints by puncturing and attaching added elements to the paper’s surface.

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Ebony G. Patterson pictured hand-embellishing her print, She Is the Mourning (2022).

ART FOR CHANGE will donate $500 from each print sale towards the Brooklyn Museum to help bolster the annual gala's aim of raising critical funding to help the institution fulfill its mission to be a home for inspiring art and courageous conversations. In keeping with all of our releases, the artist will receive 50% of the net proceeds from each print sale.

SHOP THE PRINT

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Detail images of Ebony G. Patterson’s ART FOR CHANGE print, She Is the Mourning (2022).

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ABOUT THE ARTIST

 

Ebony G. Patterson's multilayered practice– in painting, sculpture, installation, performance, and video– uses beauty as a tool to address global social and political injustices. Her immersive gardens grow out of a complex entanglement of race, gender, class, and violence. Patterson seduces the viewer into acknowledging a darker truth lurking ominously beneath the surface. Upon closer inspection, the figures in these embellished paper works are disembodied, un- whole. While the bright, effusive visual cues on the surface of her work suggest vivifying celebration, these signifiers point to the opposite. Their ghostly forms hover amidst a tangle of flora and fauna, plants which themselves might harbor a secret poison. Patterson’s gardens are never far from notions of violence, of memorial, of blood and tears.

Patterson received her BFA in painting from Edna Manley College of Visual and Performing Arts in Kingston, Jamaica in 2004. She received an MFA degree in 2006 in printmaking and drawing from the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis. Patterson has taught at the University of Virginia, Edna Manley College School of Visual and Performing Arts, Associate Professor in Painting and Mixed Media at the University of Kentucky, and was the Bill and Stephanie Sick Distinguished Visiting Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work is in the public collections of 21c Museum and Foundation, Louisville, Kentucky, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA, Nasher Museum, Duke University, Durham, NC, National Gallery of Jamaica, Kingston, JamaicaPérez Art Museum Miami, FL, Speed Art Museum, Louisville, KY, Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY, The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, among others. In 2021 Patterson was included in both the Liverpool and Athens Biennials. Currently, she lives and works in both Chicago and Kingston, Jamaica.

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